Two men jailed for blasts that triggered Kremlin's second war in rebel republic, while for Chechens the violence is worse than ever
Nick Paton Walsh in Moscow
Tuesday January 13, 2004
The Guardian
The Kremlin tried to close one of the most perplexing and shady chapters in its recent history yesterday with the sentencing of two men to life in a maximum security jail for the 1999 bombings of apartment blocks that provoked the second Chechen war.
Yusuf Krymshamkhalov and Adam Dekkushev were found guilty of terrorism, murder, illegal possession of and trafficking in explosives, and other crimes in relation to the bombings in Moscow and Volgodonsk, which killed 246 people.
Yet many Russians remain uncertain that the pair were the true perpetrators of the massive blasts - horrific acts that the Kremlin blamed on Chechen rebels, and that led to a second Kremlin-backed invasion of the war-torn separatist republic.
Vladimir Putin's tough response to "terrorism" against ordinary, blameless Russians won him the subsequent presidential election.
During the trial in Moscow, which was closed to the media until its closing moments, the prosecution said that the pair had packed sugar sacks with homemade explosive, and driven them to Volgodonsk and into the heart of Moscow on the orders of Chechen rebels.
Two suspects remain at large, and six more have been killed fighting in Chechnya.
Krymshamkhalov was also found guilty of attempted terrorism and bribing a traffic police officer.
He said that the conviction was mainly based on "lies".
The controversy surrounding the blasts centres on the foreknowledge and possible involvement of the Russian security service, the FSB.
A spokesman for the agency said the verdict "completely confirmed" the evidence that had been collected against the pair. But some of the victims' relatives remained unconvinced, and they released an open letter during the trial raising a number of questions that they said remained unanswered.
The greatest controversy in connection with the explosions has been raised by a former FSB agent, Alexander Litvinenko, who currently lives in Britain, where he has political asylum.
He wrote a book in which he claimed that the FSB had tried to carry out an almost identical apartment bombing in the town of Ryazan, east of Moscow, in September 1999.
The circumstances of the Ryazan incident were nearly identical to the Moscow and Volgodonsk bombings, and it raised many questions in the Russian media at the time, leading many Russians to fear more sinister hands that those of Krymshamkhalov and Dekkushev and their associates were at work.
Suspicion that the FSB was involved in the incident has been publicised with the help of the former Kremlin kingmaker and tycoon Boris Berezovsky. The intense personal enmity between him and President Putin, whose rise to power was promoted by Mr Berezovsky's media empire, prompted him to seek and gain political asylum in Britain. Mr Berezovsky's intense interest in the case has therefore often resulted in the inexplicable facts it proffers being dismissed as suspect: merely ammunition in a feud between factions of Russia's elite.
Mr Berezovsky called the verdict a "show" and insisted that the FSB was responsible for the explosions. The Kremlin has always dismissed the theory as nonsense.